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Worshipping an occasionally bloody game - table hockey

Keeping score at what is basically "a kid's toy with barroom appeal." On the Stiga board, a winger can swing right around to the back of the net. (STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR)

By Sarah BarmakSPECIAL TO THE STAR

Sun., Jan. 25, 2009

At ice level, it looks like some Lilliputian hockey tournament frozen in time.

But don't be fooled. The miniature players in table hockey don't stay still for long.

Its three-dimensional men, made of injection-moulded plastic, are as realistic as they come, complete with little Maple Leafs logos on their chests and tiny painted stripes on their socks.

Their six-centimetre bodies lean forward, one tiny skate off the ground, the other riveted to a podium that disappears beneath the ice. With their minuscule metal sticks at a 45-degree angle, they have perfectly natural body language.

As a timer ticks down, the familiar dun-da-dun-da-dun strains of the vintage Hockey Night in Canada theme begin to play. The disproportionately large puck drops into the centre circle. Game on.

Once in play, don't expect to see much of the puck. It goes blindingly fast – up to six metres a second, according to one fan's website. Before you have a chance to react, it's ricocheted from winger to centreman to net. Goal.

Eugene Kurz, 38, smiles at his 5-4 overtime win. The head of the Toronto Stiga Table Hockey League – named after the popular brand and formed last year – is in his element. The hockey music, programmed crowd noise, and the climax of The Crystal Method's kinetic "Busy Child" (when there's only a few seconds to go) is all part of the graphic designer's obsessively tweaked gaming atmosphere. In his table-hockey lair (otherwise known as his well-appointed, high-ceilinged Queen St. East loft), the other dozen or so members of his league had best be ready to get whupped.

On its most basic level, table hockey is – like its simpler-to-play cousin, air hockey – a kid's toy with barroom appeal. But to its most fanatical devotees, it's a passion, an altar of perfectionist gaming they return to any chance they get.

For the last decade or so, table hockey's popularity has experienced a resurgence. Though definitive numbers are hard to come by, there were 21 table hockey tournaments in North America alone last year, and a subculture has flowered online, with message boards devoted to it. Men (and a few women – Kurz's girlfriend, a recent convert, now plays in the Stiga league) are rediscovering a game they loved as children. And a new wave of younger players is being lured away from PlayStations and Xboxes to play a game of gears, plastic, and metal rods.

Table hockey is permeated by nostalgia for shag-carpeted rec rooms and enduring memories of long Christmas days spent playing against dads and brothers. Its primary-coloured, hard-plastic world is pre-Atari, pre-Nintendo and defiantly non-virtual. With few upgrades, it unapologetically remains the same game it has been for decades. (A tricked-out version made with magnets by a Burlington inventor earlier this decade failed to attract many admirers.)

Devotees claim table hockey is simply more visceral than the well-known video game NHL 09.

"You can touch the puck," says Kurz. "It's real." That includes some very real physical moments. "At last year's tournament, one guy cut his hand on the rod and bled all over the gears," recounts Kurz, adding with a grin, "he kept playing."

As if to illustrate the corporeal connection to the life-size version, players begin to remove their sweaters and glug their Creemores. It's a thirsty sport.

Yet it's also a delicate game, much more so than its ubiquitous cousin, foosball – that table-soccer game with featureless plastic men impaled in rows and found in many a bar's back room.

Both the Canadian Irwin brand of hockey table, which features flat, one-dimensional men ("more like pinball, eh," quipped one Stiga-lover), and the Swedish Stiga brand favoured by Kurz's league are made for finesse.

It is a game of reflexes and hair's-breadth timing. The puck travels too fast for the eye – it's like badminton, but two feet apart, said one player – so the players don't so much watch the puck's movements as predict them.

AS IN REAL hockey, table-hockey teams wait for breakdowns in the other's defence. Controlled by rods that move them through slots in the silicone-lubricated "ice," the little men make breakout passes. With the Stiga table, the left forward can even get behind the net to "Gretzky's office."

League members keep meticulous stats on the five-minute games, publishing results weekly on their website (www.tsthl.ca). There are also leagues in the U.S. and Europe, where Swedes and Russians are crazy about the game.

For members of the Toronto league, playing Stiga seems to be a trip back to kidland. No one gabs much about work or traffic.

In fact, some table-hockey devotees are still kids themselves. The current world champion, for example, is an 18-year-old from Finland, Roni Nuttunen. Mark Sokolski is one of the reasons behind that trend. A Petawawa sixth-grade teacher with a soul patch and a passion for gaming, he keeps hockey tables in his classroom and has his students hooked. "I see it really making a comeback," says the 32-year-old. "It's exactly what all the kids (in my class) got for Christmas this year."

One of his former students went on to win a championship in Sokolski's Toronto Classic Table Hockey Championship, held at the University of Toronto each year. Touted as the largest table-hockey extravaganza in North America, it's attracted up to 100 participants in the past. It celebrates its 10th anniversary on March 21.

The event illustrates what table hockey has and what video games – even Xbox live – don't: face-to-face contact.

"We get together, we socialize," says Sokolski. "It's a far different scene."

At his tourney, fans will continue to play what they say is the most perfect substitute for the real thing.

"The guys who are good at it can make it sing like a Stradivarius violin," says Sokolski. "There's something magical and spectacular when you can make a perfect pass to your centreman and tip it off the goal post, with a real person (across from you). When you put a puck top shelf, it's because you want to, not because the computer decided to."

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